He saw that Rivers had torn off, where it was possible, half pages from the old and yellowed letters; these were carefully banded together, while on fresh sheets of paper, the old letters in part, or in whole, were cleverly copied.
There was one yellowed half sheet in the old doctor’s handwriting bearing a new form of expression––there was no original of this. Maclin made sure of that. He read this new form once, twice, three times.
“If the time should ever come, my girl, when you and Larry could not agree, he’ll give you this letter. It is all I could do for him; it will prove that I trust you, at every turn, to do the right and just thing. Stand by Larry, as I have done.”
Maclin puffed out his cheeks. They looked like a child’s red balloon. “What in hell!” he ejaculated.
Larry’s face was gray. Guilt is always quick to hold up its hands when it thinks the enemy has the drop on it.
“Can’t you understand?” he whispered through dry lips. “I want to outwit them. I’m as keen as you, Maclin, and I’m working for you, old man, working for you! I was going to take this to her––she’ll do anything when she reads that––and I was going to tell her why the old man stood by me. That would shut her mouth and make her pay.”
There is in the shield of every man a weak spot. There was one in the shield of Maclin’s brutal villainy. For a moment 163 he felt positively virtuous; perhaps the sensation proved the embryo virtue in all.
“Are any of these things real?” he asked with a rough catch in his voice; “and don’t lie to me––it wouldn’t be healthy.”
“No.”
“You got your wife by letting her think your old father wanted it, wrote about it?”